It's the sort of image you see when the nightly television news throw to the latest story about our over-reliance on fast food or health issues related to obesity.

The image of an overweight person, their head cut off, sitting on a bench crouched over, eating burgers; or the obese person smoking as they walk along the street.

It's a very generic, stereotypical image of overweight people as unhealthy and lazy, and it's inspired the creation of an online image gallery called Stocky Bodies.

The collaborative project between Dr Lauren Gurrieri of Griffith Business School and Isaac Brown of the Queensland College of Art, was created in response to the "stigmatised representations of overweight and obese people in the media".

Mr Brown says the site is helping challenge the oversimplified and demeaning representations of a 'fat' person by providing free images for use by the media, health professionals, social marketers and educators.

"They're all documentary images; they show a variety of things, not just the stereotypical headless shot. It's about identity, really."

Nicholas Perkins, who is featured on the website says he's quite happy to be called fat, because sometimes the sensitive language used for overweight people adds to the stigmatism.

"I'm definitely a fat person; I'm not big-boned. I have the same size bones of everyone else. I'm a fat man.

He says 'fat' people are being unfairly represented in the media when stereotypical 'fat' images are used.

"It's distressing, particularly so when the heads are cut off, so they're dehumanised.

"You don't see images of people doing everyday stuff; it's usually people walking down the street with bags of food, or someone sitting on the couch doing not much. Whereas fat people are doing lots of different things, just like everyone else," he says.

Mr Brown says he hopes the site will expand, as attitudes change.

"We're looking for both contributors and more participants. At this stage we've just got the 6 participants we've been photographing."